Arts & Culture | Theater

One of the most colorful and controversial performers of his generation, Oscar Levant was an immensely gifted composer, pianist and raconteur whose life and career were hobbled by a ferocious addiction to prescription drugs.

With its multiplicity of rituals and its insistence on punctilious observance, Judaism is often jokingly referred to as a religion for obsessive-compulsives. Now comes Adam Strauss’ one-man show, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” which details the Jewish stand-up comedian’s struggles with real OCD, his last-ditch effort to cure it with psychedelic mushrooms, and his ultimate discovery of spiritual enlightenment.

Luck is always in high demand for characters in musicals. From “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” in “Guys and Dolls” to “With a Little Bit of Luck” in “My Fair Lady,” good fortune can make all the difference in a character’s romantic and financial prospects.

Can a Jewish parent forgive a child’s gravitating toward another faith? In Antonia Lassar’s one-woman show, “The God Box,” a Jewish mother discovers, after her 30-year-old daughter, Rebecca, has been killed in a car accident, that the daughter had been experimenting with a plethora of religious traditions.

The Flood might not seem like an apt subject for musical comedy, but long before such biblically themed musicals as “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” there was “Two by Two,” a 1970 musical about Noah starring Danny Kaye. Composed by Richard Rodgers with lyrics by Martin Charnin and a book by Peter Stone, it ran for almost a year on Broadway.

In its heyday in the late 1970s, Studio 54 was the best-known, most-notorious nightclub in the world — a venue for drugs, debauchery and disco that attracted the likes of Bianca Jagger, Andy Warhol and Liza Minelli.